Exploring Your Member Benefits, Part 5

Hosting A Play Day

Part of belonging to a Guild is getting together with others who share your interests. A Play Day is a free, informal gathering of Guild members to explore some facet of glass work, usually held at a member’s house. This isn’t the host being a teacher, it’s a chance to get together and play with glass. There are some videos of Play Days on the Guild website under Glass>Education.
Log-in before going to any of these links: Enamel, done as before and after sessions in 3 videos, Fossil Vitria done as a Zoom, Vitrograph pulling, edited to show process rather than beginner’s learning experiences.

Scraffito Play Day

How to set up a Play Day

  1. Think of some glass technique that can be done in about 3 hours or broken into 2 to 3 hour chunks. Figure out how much space it needs and how many people you feel comfortable hosting in person.
  2. Put together a materials list. It’s OK to put out a donations bucket to defray your costs if it isn’t a project that has members bringing all their own materials.
  3. Invite members over to play. Guild Play Days are member only events so please ask folks to join the Guild before they attend.
  4. If you want the publicity of making it a Guild event, notify the Play Days coordinator and they’ll see that it gets on the calendar and sent out in the Guild news. If there’s enough lead time we can also publicize it through the Newsletter.

Making it a Zoom meeting allows all members to join in and helps promote the broader reach of the Guild. Doing this successfully requires getting a volunteer who acts as Zoom intermediary for the on-line participants rather than taking an active part in the Play Day projects.

We encourage you to record it, edit it, and put a link to it in the education section of the website for members to watch later (give links to the websites of instructors you’ve taken classes from rather than sharing their secrets). Contact Karen Seymour for help uploading your video to the Guild’s website or send her a link to it on your own Youtube channel.

We also welcome a short article with photos about your Play Day. Send it to the newsletter editors.

Check the Guild calendar and watch your email for a Play Day near you!